Learning Analytics comes from a report about the impact of emerging technologies for practitioners in a field. That sounds like the title of a report that NTEN might produce that surveys the technology landscape and nonprofit usage and provides an overview of what technologies nonprofits should be looking at in the next 1-5 years. And, NTEN is the first stop for nonprofits to go for this type of field level of research and coverage. For those of us who also focused on training, instruction, and professional learning for nonprofits, the New Media Consortium, has been charting the landscape of emerging technologies in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry on a global scale for the past ten years.

The report methodology models the open content technology identified in the report. To create the report, an international body of experts in education, technology, and other fields convene on a wiki to review research, practice, and significant trends. Their inquiry adds great richness to the reports which includes an overview of the technology, case studies of how early adopters are using it, and synthesis of current research. It also creates a resource called the Horizon Navigator an online, open-content database of free research on emerging technologies, is a dynamic social media platform overlying an innovative set of intelligent search tools and a comprehensive collection of resources.

Not only does the report cover emerging technologies, but they are using some of the technologies to produce and distribute the report. This report is not just your father’s PDF file!

The technology trend that caught my eye was “Learning Analytics,” which is big data applied to the field of education. Learning analytics is an emergent field of research that aspires to use data analysis to inform decisions made on every area education, from understanding student data to build better pedagogies, target at-risk students, and to assess whether programs designed have been effective and should be sustained. As a practitioner, what interests me most using the data to gain insights about student interaction with material and courseware and tracking results of training. It also has benefits to students themselves who can use the data to customize their participation in the class.

Learning analytics is not brand new and first identified in the education area in about 2008 according to this excellent primer on Learning Analytics that found by searching the Project Navigator on the topic. It is identified as mid-term adoption technology – as learning analytics continues to be an emerging field, one that is growing quickly, but is still just out of reach for most educators. It is particularly relevant to those who are using online learning environments. This year, the rise of big data was the subject of discussions across many disciplines, including the nonprofit sector. Data scientists all over the world are beginning to look at vast sets of data through analytical methods pioneered by businesses to predict consumer behaviors. The future of those who do training or teaching for professionals may be that we rely on data to make carefully calculated adjustments and suggestions to keep learners motivated as they master concepts or encounter the challenge of transferring knowledge into practice.

The report offers examples of learning anlaytics in higher education as well as a curated list of articles to get up to speed. Here’s a few that I found most informative:

[…] Learning Analytics: Big Data Applied to Training, Teaching, and … http://www.bethkanter.org/The technology trend that caught my eye was “Learning Analytics,” which is big data applied to the field of education. Learning analytics is an emergent field of research that aspires to use data analysis to inform decisions … […]

[…] Learning Analytics: Big Data Applied to Training, Teaching, and … http://www.bethkanter.org/Learning Analytics comes from a report about the impact of emerging technologies for practitioners in a field. That sounds like the title of a report that. […]

[…] Learning Analytics: Big Data Applied to Training, Teaching, and … http://www.bethkanter.org/Learning Analytics comes from a report about the impact of emerging technologies for practitioners in a field. That sounds like the title of a report that. […]

[…] Learning Analytics: Big Data Applied to Training, Teaching, and … http://www.bethkanter.org/The technology trend that caught my eye was “Learning Analytics,” which is big data applied to the field of education. Learning analytics is an emergent field of research that aspires to use data analysis to inform decisions … […]

[…] Learning Analytics: Big Data Applied to Training, Teaching, and … http://www.bethkanter.org/It also creates a resource called the Horizon Navigator an online, open-content database of free research on emerging technologies, is a dynamic social media platform overlying an innovative set of intelligent search tools and a comprehensive collection of resources. Not only does the report cover emerging … The technology trend that caught my eye was “Learning Analytics,” which is big data applied to the field of education. Learning analytics is an emergent field of … […]

[…] For those of us who also focused on training, instruction, and professional learning for nonprofits, the New Media Consortium, has been charting the landscape of emerging technologies in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry on a … […]

First of all, Thanks for your valuable, interactive and informative content which you had mentioned here.
I have gone through your each and every point which you tried to focus here and I do agree with you because in this modernization world and in coming future we will have so many unstructured Data for processing but to handle it,we need a new concept and that is Big Data Analytic. Now,Big data is a challenging lead in data science and It really means taking advantage of new technologies, tools, and new ways of thinking about problems.big data enables you to analyze more accurately, make more confident decisions and realize better operational efficiencies.As we centralize additional data sets and correlate them, Through this learning and teaching experience ,we find new relationships through which we can resolve our issues.